Sadr City Fighters Lay Defenses Amid Latest Official Efforts at Calm

BAGHDAD — As the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army fighters squatted in the Sadr City district’s main highways on Friday, planting homemade bombs less than a mile from Iraqi and American troops, his political bloc offered on Friday to negotiate with the Iraqi government to end fighting in the area.

Posing as municipal workers in fluorescent orange and yellow vests, three militia members — one masked with a checkered head scarf — dug holes in one main thoroughfare while wary drivers skirted around them and loose wires trailed across the street every few yards. Nearby, some of the heaviest fighting in weeks broke out late Friday night.

The mixed messages, at once conciliatory and threatening, are a hallmark of the Sadr movement, which appears to be gearing up to confront the government both with bullets and at the ballot box in provincial elections this fall.

As thousands of Shiites gathered for Friday Prayer, United States and Iraqi troops continued to ring Sadr City, the east Baghdad neighborhood that is Mr. Sadr’s Baghdad redoubt.

In recent days, United States forces have built high concrete blast walls to cordon off Sadr City’s government-controlled southern section from the rest of the sprawling district, which remains firmly under the control of the Mahdi Army militia. Within that Mahdi-controlled area, Falah Shanshal, a Sadrist member of Parliament, said Friday that the American and Iraqi government offensive in Sadr City was a “political war against the Sadrists.”

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki insists that the offensive is aimed at criminals and illegal militias, not at the Sadrists in particular. But Mr. Shanshal said Mr. Maliki was using the accusation of criminal activity in Sadr City as a pretext for “mass punishment” intended to discourage Mr. Sadr’s supporters from participating in the provincial elections.

One of the policies Mr. Shanshal singled out for criticism was the decision of the American military and the Iraqi government to introduce to Baghdad’s most populous district the blast walls, which have been used to seal off and divide other neighborhoods.

The walls are intended to stop Mahdi fighters from infiltrating areas from which mortars and rockets have been fired at the high-security Green Zone, which lies four miles to the west.

During a tour of several streets in the Mahdi-controlled area on Friday, it was clear that concrete blast walls erected elsewhere in Sadr City had been moved or knocked down. Some were covered with anti-American slogans.

“They are just building the walls to cut the city into pieces that are isolated from each other,” Mr. Shanshal said. “It has always been a united area.”

Sadr City is a huge neighborhood, measuring about two miles by three miles, in Baghdad’s poorest quarter. Overwhelmingly Shiite, it consists mainly of cheap, poor-quality houses, street markets, shops, mosques and government buildings, and it has filthy, slumlike outlying areas that appear to expand annually in a haphazard manner.

It is separated from the rest of the city by a canal, and Iraqi or American troops are now stationed in force at the crossing points. On some days they try, with varying degrees of success, to seal off the neighborhood. On others, including Friday, they allow vehicles to enter and leave on some roads.

Sadr City is now divided into three zones: a small area under American and Iraqi government control; a much larger one under the Mahdi Army militia, where many streets are calm and businesses and grassy recreation areas were open as usual; and in between, a fluid no man’s land where much of the fighting is centered and civilians are afraid to venture.

Photo

Men in Sadr City district shook hands to conclude Friday Prayer. Their cleric spoke against the American presence there. Credit
Michael Kamber for The New York Times

On Friday, one such front-line area, the main Jamila market, was a charred, half-deserted stretch of shuttered stores, garbage and abandoned vegetable trolleys. The smell of burning was everywhere. Gangs of young men loitered near doorways.

Only 50 yards from a traffic circle controlled by the Mahdi militia, two American armored vehicles — one of them an MRAP, for Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected — were visible; nervous Iraqi drivers edged between the sides.

The Mahdi Army militia, which has flaunted its weapons and two weeks ago could be seen sitting on street corners with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles, is now largely invisible, if only to avoid missiles from American helicopter gunships and other aircraft.

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Pro-Sadr graffiti could be seen everywhere, even on the walls of the Rafidain police station, where officers sat passively in the guardroom.

Sadrists had banned Western journalists from Sadr City but lifted the prohibition on Friday; they insisted, however, on accompanying them some of the time.

The fighting late Friday was in the American-held area; Reuters reported that 132 people had been admitted to Sadr City hospitals Friday evening.

At the Sadr Hospital in the neighborhood, a number of the patients had been injured by the fighting. A doctor had also been killed on her way to work, said Sihan Zaidan, 35, the chief nurse in the children’s ward.

Sadrist members of Parliament said that 398 people had been killed in Sadr City and 1,331 wounded, and that 91 houses had been destroyed in the past three weeks.

There was no way to verify the numbers, but there have been daily clashes in the area, and in hospital interviews it was clear that many women and children had been wounded, usually as they stood in their doorways, walked to the corner to buy bread or took a breath of fresh air on the roof.

Often it was unclear who was responsible for the shootings. While those who are Sadr supporters blamed either the Iraqi government troops or the American military, many people interviewed in a local hospital said they did not know who had shot them.

Upstairs in the children’s ward, Ali Mortada, 3, lay silently on his bed, looking at his aunt, who sat beside him. A bullet tore through his abdomen on Thursday evening as he stood with his father and uncle at the front gate of their house.

“We heard the sound of shooting, but it did not seem so close so we thought it wasn’t very dangerous,” said Khalid Zeda, 28, the uncle.

“We have gotten so accustomed to fighting that even when a mortar hits our neighbor’s house, we don’t notice,” Mr. Zeda said. “We are unemployed, so we cannot stand to be indoors all day — it is like a prison.”

To reach the hospital, Ali’s relatives had to pass through an American checkpoint. They feared they would be shot if they drove, said Mr. Zeda, who added, “We walked a long way, holding Ali in our arms and holding him up to show him to the American soldiers so that they would let us pass.”

Mr. Zeda said he did not know where the bullet had come from, but he said, “The Americans should leave, and of course the government is involved, too.”

Qais Mizher, Ali Hameed and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Sadr City Fighters Lay Defenses Amid Latest Official Efforts at Calm. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe